


Dollhouse

by murg



Category: Original Work
Genre: Apocalypse, Childhood Trauma, Dysfunctional Family, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Global Warming, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Unreliable Narrator, does anyone even read original content here, youngest sibling pain is valid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 13:42:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16096820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/murg/pseuds/murg
Summary: The sun is hotter than it's ever been, or ever going to be. The world is ending. And here I am, spending my last hours in a house full of bad memories. I don’t know why I agreed to come back to Vermont. I guess I felt bad for Molly.





	Dollhouse

**Author's Note:**

> this is a draft of a short story i wrote. i may remove it from online sometime, just a personal preference. it's technically still WIP, but not much has been changed for the past months so this is almost as good as it's gonna get, i guess. just thought i'd throw it up here in the meantime, though, for my own reference.

            Molly’s at the kitchen counter, her thin fingers wrapped around her mug. It’s the same stained laminate we sat at as kids, the same corner chipped off and glued clumsily back on.

            “How’d you sleep,” she says, not moving.   

            “Not good,” I admit, sliding onto a chair. The creaky chair.

            “Thanks for coming,” she says.

            “No problem.” But it was a problem. We both know that.

            I lick my lips. I’m thirsty. Does that even matter? I don’t know. I’ve been thirsty for a while. Considering everything that’s happened. Happening.

            “There’s coffee,” Molly says. My eyes crawl to the coffeemaker. “Mugs are in the same place.” Left-most cabinet.

            I feel like I went back in time. The old stage is still set, but the actors aren’t here anymore. I feel off-center. Tilted. Reeling. Fine.

            I pull a mug down from the cabinet. Chipped on the handle. Mom dropped it in the sink one night, after dinner. It has a cat on it and the handle is its tail. Molly’s favorite mug. The coffee is Mom’s brand. The smell itches, deep in my throat.

            “Hey,” Molly says.

            “Hey.”

            “Have you heard from Tony? I asked him to come.”

            The cat’s glossy eyes look up at me. I talked to him on the phone, a few weeks ago, after Molly called me. I don’t think he’s coming, but I don’t tell Molly that. He’s in Texas, with his family. His kids and wife. Not us. He’s got a lot of opinions about everything so I don’t think he’s coming, but no, I won’t tell Molly that. “Huh? No.”

            “Patty asked me about it, last night,” she says, looking down at her mug. Her fingers are bone white. They look like maggots, in a neat row.

            The counter bites into my lower back. I shrug. “She sleeping?”

            “Everyone’s sleeping.” She purses her lips. “Thanks for coming.”

            “No problem.” I fiddle with the mug, rubbing it between my palms. A painting sits above the kitchen sink. It’s of a field with daisies in it. It looks like a knock-off Norman Rockwell. Our mom picked it out at Target. I wonder how many other houses have the same painting, hanging in their kitchens.

            Molly sighs. I watch her fingers drum on her mug, piano keys. “I don’t...” She sighs again, tugging her hair behind her ear. “I don’t know.”

            Tony isn’t coming. I don’t say that, but it’s on the tip of my tongue.

            “It means a lot to me,” she says, “that you came.”

            “No problem.” I wipe my hands on my jeans. “How’s Patty?”

            “She’s scared.” She fiddles with stray wisps of hair, pressing them against her lips. “I mean. That makes sense, right?”

            “Does she understand what’s happening?”

            “Does anyone understand?”

            I shrug. I’ve never met Patty. Molly had her in Illinois, where she lives. Lived. I don’t even know what town. Just Illinois.

            “How was Baltimore?” Molly asks.

            “It’s fine,” I say. “Considering.” I fiddle with the mug, my finger digging into the fracture on the tail. Molly has dark circles under her eyes, looping like tree rings, all the nights she hasn’t slept.

            Tony isn’t coming. He told me as much. He called me, four weeks ago. Molly called him, too, he said. I’m probably not coming, he said. I’m a father, he said. You don’t get it. I’m a father, I can’t just take them up to the middle of nowhere just to drop like a bunch of flies. We’re doing things our way. If there’s a possibility of getting out of this, you better believe we’re going to take it. I don’t fucking care what the fucking news says, okay, listen to me. Nothing is...is, like, certain, like, preordained. Do you understand?

            I didn’t ask him again, after that. He’d made himself clear, I think. Molly can’t know, though. It would wreck her. She’d cry, for sure. There are just certain things no one here should know. It would wreck her completely.

            I look at the cracked clock. It’s deathly still. The sun is beginning to peek its head over the rolling mountains, squinting down on us. Early, but not too early. Like when we used to wake up for church, wet-eyed and confused. My shivering spine craned against the pew in ill-fitting hand-me-downs, Tony’s oversized collar scraping against my raw neck. Mom arranging my limbs, folding my hands over my thighs, knocking my ankles apart with her heeled foot.

            “How’d you sleep?”

            “You already asked me that.”

            “Oh.” She pets her mug, pursing her lips.

            “Not good,” I say.

            “Was your drive okay?”

            “Traffic’s horrible.” I look down at my coffee. “Backed all the way out the Northway.” When I hit my exit on I-87, I had to drive off road to get around all of the abandoned cars. Inconsiderate jackasses. I almost careened into the lake. “Smooth sailing once I got in-state. There was no one anywhere.” Not even animals. Not even birds.      

            “I’m surprised you got here on time,” she says. “It’s the first time I can remember you ever being punctual. You used to be such a mess, as a kid. We always had to direct you everywhere. You couldn’t cross the street without someone moving your legs for you.”

            “Ha ha,” I say.

            I threw up on the roadside, a couple of times. It was so hot, and all the water I drank felt like piss going down my throat. I was shaking like a meth-head the whole drive up, my jaw rattling around in my skull. I felt like a doll with all its stuffing ripped out. Thirsty and hollow. Half a person. I don’t mention any of that. Molly looks haggard enough. I don’t really think I can console her, but I don’t want to make anything worse than it has to be.

            “It’s weird,” I say, “sleeping in my old bed.” My old bed faces another stripped mattress. Tony’s old bed. The room smells like mothballs. The single light bulb blinks and sizzles. I wonder if it’s the same light bulb from high school. The thought makes me irrationally angry. “I’m too big for the mattress.”

            “It’s good to have you here.”

            “No problem.” Tony would wake up in the middle of the night. I could see his eyes reflecting in the light like cat’s eyes. I always went to bed with my comforter over my head, suffocating me to sleep, just so I wouldn’t have to see them, glittering like little diamonds.

            Our mom has a calendar of “good thoughts,” next to the sink. It’s still stuck on June 18th, a week ago. It says: People who are always sad take life too personally.

            We’re running out of things to talk about. Or I am. I don’t know much about what’s been going on with Molly. Where’s her husband? I don’t ask. The answer is obvious. Not here.

            “This house has seen better days, huh,” Molly says. “Landline was down when I got here.”

            “Right.”

            “Probably been down a week or so. Maybe less,” she says. “That’s how long it’s been since I heard from Mom. A week.”

            “A week.”

            “A week, yeah.”

            I fiddle with the mug, twisting from side to side. The cat’s face follows me. “Why’s the landline down? Did she tell you?”

            Molly shrugs, licking her lips. A bubble of spittle forms at the corner of her mouth. I run my hand over the counter, the little bumps in the laminate scraping against the pads of my fingers.

            “Landline’s probably out all over,” I say. “Lots of electrical outages. Blowouts. Everything was on generator in Baltimore. The wiring can’t take the heat. Lots of people don’t even have fans going in their apartments. Everyone’s been clambering into the subway stations.”

            She winces, rubbing her wrists. “Yeah, that’s probably it. Can we not talk about that? It’s awful.”

            “Yeah, it is.”

            She balls her face up, the skin above her nose scrunching. “I’m sick of everyone always trying to talk about it. It won’t change anything. We’re just making ourselves suffer. You understand, right?”

            “Yeah, I understand, Molly.”

            But what else is there to talk about? It’s so hot. That’s all there is, now, just us and the heat. And soon it’ll be just the heat. Molly runs her fingers over her mug. They stick to the porcelain, fat and dripping, like waxen toddler’s fingers.

            The sun glares through the window, an angry, bloated yellow. Big piss ball, I think, crinkling my nose. I think of it as a bulbous head, swinging above us in the sky, a giant eye. Malevolent, violent, ugly thing. Strange, dumb thoughts. I smooth my face out.

            The grass in the yard is dead. Little wisps of brown and yellow poking out of the cracked clay like arm hairs. Molly’s car and my car in the driveway. Both dusty blues. I’ve seen so many dusty cars. I stopped by the gas station in central New York, near Rome, and I refilled my two gas cans along with my tank. I didn’t need to refill my two gas cans, but I did. I screwed the cap off the tank and I slid my credit card into the kiosk and punched out my PIN. I thought to myself, this doesn’t matter. But I still need to pay, because otherwise I’d be stealing. I stared the gas station attendant in the eyes, my fingers stiff around the pump. He had blue eyes, like little ponds.

            The attendant only watched me. I don’t know, maybe I expected some twitch in his face, some acknowledgement that I paid, that I didn’t steal. But I didn’t see it. The air was tight and coiled, looping around my limbs and tugging them into ghost motions. I climbed into my car and I turned the ignition. He was still looking at me, I could feel his eyes on me. I wondered why he hadn’t left. And gone where? I thought. I don’t know, I thought. Somewhere else. I was going somewhere else, wasn’t I?

            I drove away, a full tank and two extra cans I wasn’t sure I needed. I didn’t need acknowledgement, I told myself, reaching down to make sure I put my credit card back in my pocket. Of course I did. I reach down, and it’s still there, now, in my front pocket. My credit card.

            I wipe my forehead, my hand returning to my side, coated in sweat and grease. I feel dirty. I don’t think it really matters, though. I still have a full gas can sitting in my car, and that definitely doesn’t matter.

            “I should call Tony,” Molly says.

            “No cell service.” The boonies.

            “Right.” She swallows. I watch her throat move. The ridges underneath her skin roll over each other, like scales on a flexing cobra. Her knuckles are taut, quivering. She rubs her forehead. “Sorry. I’m just. I’m tired. I haven’t been sleeping good. I don’t know, I. I just wanted us all to be together, that’s all.”

            I watch Molly sag over her mug. It’s so hot. It’s always gotten hot here, in the summer, but it’s worse now. We once bought a kiddie pool, when I was a freshman in high school, and we all crammed inside of it, with the hose spitting out ice cubes. I ended up crushed under their limbs, my kneecaps drawn to my nipples. Molly’s hip meat eclipsed my pelvis, slopping over her bikini string. My face was shoved under Tony’s armpit. Mom and Dad were on the porch, reading the newspaper, their eyes hidden behind the headlines. The water was so cold, and I loved that. I loved how cold it was. I lick my lips, absently.

            “Mom and Dad still aren’t up, huh.”

            Molly tucks her hair behind her ear. “I don’t know.”

            “Should I go wake them up?”

            She flushes, green around the eyes. “Just let them sleep,” she whispers.

            “Okay.” I stir some sugar into my coffee. I set the spoon back in the bowl. The white grains bleed brown. I figure it doesn’t really matter, anymore. I glance out the window, past the fake daisy field, licking my teeth. I taste mothballs. The sun rolls its shoulders over the mountains, like a hunchback.

            I don’t know why I agreed to come. I guess I felt bad for Molly.

            Molly called me on the phone four weeks ago, crying through the crackling receiver. I squinted in the dim light of my bedroom, trying to make out her words on my ceiling. You’ve got to come home, she said. I’m coming home.

            I didn’t say anything.

            You’ve got to come home. I’m coming home. I’m trying to get a hold of Tony, I want us all to go home. We need to go home. I read the newspapers and they all say we’re gonna go out in a month. That’s what the scientists say. I trust the scientists. We need to go home.

            Vermont, I said.

            Yes, that’s home, she said and I could hear her nose dripping over the phone line.

            I closed my eyes and I could see Vermont, painted on my eyelids. Cornfields and mountains that looked like hills that had grown too fat. Cracked roads and cows that stared at us with dull, glassy eyes as we drove by, rattling around in the back of our dad’s truck. Molly’s fat fingers crushing my wrist against the burning metal, so that I wouldn’t fall out. She thought that I was prone to falling out. I had done it twice, but only on dirt backroads. One time, it was on purpose. Ever since then, Molly grabbed at me whenever she worried. Like I would topple without support.

            I called Mom, she said. She says she’d like us all to come sooner rather than later. She says they’re both going nuts. She says they don’t want to feel pain. I don’t want to feel pain, either. We need to go home.

            Everything had always felt so distant in Vermont. Like no one could touch me. I could see them touch me, I would watch their hands move and wrap around my skin, but I never processed it.

            I just don’t want it to hurt, Molly whimpered over the phone.

            I never really processed it, I thought. That’s for the best, isn’t it? I think so. It’s better that way. Vermont was kind of like its own contained universe. We’d walk to the corner market as kids and they would give us squares of maple sugar. They would look me in the eyes, pupils drifting over my ear, down my neck, with a burning intensity. Hello, little man, they would say with slow voices. I would lift my upper lip and reveal my gaping mouth. They would laugh, slip me another sugar square. Little, awkward kindnesses.

            I don’t know, I said, my words slurred and slow.

            Please, she said. I just want us all to be together. They need us to be there for them. We’re their kids.

            I stared at my dark ceiling, hesitance forming a ball in the hollow ridge of my throat. What was I supposed to do? I still don’t know, not really. There aren’t any easy answers to stuff like this.

            “I really am glad you came, though,” Molly says. “I missed you a lot. It’s been a long time since I got to see you in person, not just over video chat or anything.”

            I can’t remember the last time we even video chatted. “Yeah.”

            “You were the little baby of the family.”

            “Uh huh.”

            “I liked to hold you, when you were born. I definitely liked holding you more than that creepy American Girl doll Aunt Gretchen bought me. You probably don’t remember that, though.”

            “Right.”

            “We used to have outings,” she says. “Remember? Outings.”

            Outings, sure. To the corner market, to the meat market, and to church. All blurs, half-sped up and fuzzy in the recesses of my mind. Were there other places people went to? Of course. And we went to other places, too, but we didn’t really. We ate dinner in the same diner every other Friday, where the food was always burnt. We went to little league games where we didn’t know any of the kids on the field. The content wasn’t important. It was an issue of presentation. Like the act at being human was more than enough.

            “Outings,” I say.

            Long days in the height of summer, the sun over the tops of our heads, turning our skin red until it peeled off like the outer layers of a garlic clove, sapping the energy from our eyes until they grew heavy and we sagged in our chairs by sunset. Mom always made the same three things for dinner, every week. You’re lucky you get dinner, she said. Some kids don’t get dinner, you know that? My jaw would rotate mechanically around potatoes, molars rubbing into the granular texture of sand. You know that?

            “And, like, we’d have these little picnics, where I pretended to be the mom and Tony pretended to be the dad and Moxie was our baby. Remember Moxie?”

            “What was I?”

            Molly shrugs, grinning. “Moxie was our old cat. She lived a long time, huh? I think she died when you were a freshman in high school.”

            “Yeah, she did. Two days before my fifteenth birthday.” I crane my neck, eyes stuck on my old bedroom door. Tony kicked a crack in our door when I was nine. It was just wide enough that, if anyone bothered to squint, they could see inside. The bed sheets tasted old and awful, like mothballs. Hand-me-down bed sheets. Tony’s old bed sheets. I would lie very still, listening to Tony’s ragged breathing, the layers of mucus in his throat rattling against the window panes. I’d stiffen my legs, then my stomach, my arms, my neck, my jaw, and think about rigor mortis.

            “I wish Moxie were still alive, I would’ve liked for Patty to play with her.”

            “I don’t think it’d be possible. She’d be ancient, by cat standards.”

            Molly wrinkles her nose at me. “Why are you always so negative?”

            I blink.

            “Anyways, all the fun stuff is gone from around the house. Stuff for Patty to play with, you know. Like they took down the swing set and the kiddie pool.”

            “The kiddie pool got a mold infestation.”

            “A girl her age needs stimulation. She’s a smart cookie, you’ll see. She’s an individual, that’s for sure.”

            “Is she scared?”

            Molly shrugs.

            I stare at the painting over the sink. I wonder if Molly or Tony have any mass-produced paintings in their kitchens. Probably. I look at the counter, at the chipped corner. I tore open the skin below my collarbone by running into the glued-on chunk of laminate, when I was eleven. There’s a faint scar, hardly even there anymore.

            “The cable’s out here, too.”

            “I would assume.”

            “I think that’s just cruel,” Molly says, zipping her fingers through her hair. “You know what I mean? I think it’s just ridiculous, I’d rather be watching television right now, if I’m being honest with you.”

            “Understandable,” I say.

            “Who am I kidding, they’d probably just have a bunch of shitty news stations on, telling everyone what they already know, anyways.”

            “Maybe some Hallmark movies.”

            “Maybe.”

            I crack my knuckles, each one going off like a firecracker. Molly peers into her mug, lips wobbling. “You should probably wake Patty up,” I say.

            “Is there anything wrong with sleeping? Isn’t that the best case scenario?”

            “Yeah, I guess so.”

            “Would you want it any differently for yourself?”

            “No.”

            “See, that’s what I thought. But I’m awake and you’re awake.”

            “Well, I mean, it’s almost nine-thirty. Hard to imagine how everyone’s sleeping in this long, considering how hot it is.”

            She sags over the counter. “Can we not talk about this anymore?”

            “Okay.” Her skin squeaks against the laminate as she shifts. Molly is still bigger than me, even after puberty and a good part of my twenties. I’m taller than her, now, but she’s still bigger than me. Nothing has changed. We only got older.

            “The drive from Illinois was awful. Traffic out the wing-wang.”

            “That sucks.”

            “It was hard, leaving,” she says. “I had a lot of friends. You have no idea.”

            “Yeah.”

            “I mean, it’s not like you had anything keeping you in Baltimore.”

            “No, I guess not.”

            Molly’s right. I didn’t have anything keeping me in Baltimore. Besides my Baltimore bedroom. There was no light on the ceiling, in my Baltimore bedroom, only a lamp on my night table and a window. The only other thing I had tying me to Baltimore was Daisy, who I went out to coffee with, the night before I left for Vermont. For home. We both ordered six-dollar coffees and sat by the window, away from the drone of the television and the generator. She’d dyed her hair a new color, I realized ten minutes into our visit. Her hair wasn’t naturally pink.

            You’re like a nonentity, she said. You don’t share much, you know? 

            There’s not much to share, I said.

            I know. You’re shallow. It’s like you’re pre-packaged, with a layer of cellophane between you and the rest of the world.

            I watched her sip from her coffee daintily, the way lionesses slip their tongues into watering holes on the savanna. I was a little nauseous, so I didn’t drink. I just fiddled with the cup, running my hands over the cold edges. I stared out the window, watching her reflection’s lips move. I saw symmetries between our limbs and animal limbs, but I didn’t see symmetries between our faces and the reflections in the glass.

            You know, she said, I’ve got a Bachelors. I read a lot of books.

            I know, I said. I looked out the window, past our reflections, at the sky. A nervous drop of anticipatory sweat crept down my forehead, over my eyelashes.

            Daisy swallowed her coffee. I was disgusted by the movement of her throat, but I didn’t say anything. I don’t believe in God, she said.

            Okay.

            I think you’re fucking stupid if you believe in God. Look around. They say the world’s gone to shit, but it’s always been shit. You’d know that if you read Foucault.

            I looked at the barista, slouched over the counter. I wondered why he hadn’t left. I wondered if he would leave, tomorrow, when I did.

            This is just what it’s always been, she said. Now its skin’s peeled back.

            I didn’t say anything. Daisy got into moods. It’s one of the reasons she broke up with me. She got into a mood. There were a lot of reasons besides that, though.

            I don’t believe in God, she said. She took a sip from her coffee. Her lipstick left a stain on the plastic rim. I wondered why she was wearing lipstick. I wondered why they added a quarter cup of water to the coffee after they added the ice.

            I felt very weary, in my bones. Like I was rooted to the chair, a dowel rod through each thigh keeping me upright. Aren’t you scared? I said, before I could think about it.

            She stared at me. No, she said.

            Oh.

            Jesus, no, I’m not scared. Why? Do I look scared? I don’t look scared, do I?

            No, I said, looking at her in the glass. The generator squealed like a pig on a hook. I blinked, in slow motion, imagining a camera shutter.

            Daisy licked her lips, scowling. You’re so presumptuous, she said. Presumptuous, you know what that word means?

            Yes.

            No, evidently, you don’t.

            I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t any point. I learned that, a long time ago. I knew what people were like, and I’d made my peace with it.

            I don’t believe in God, she said again. I don’t believe in an afterlife. I think we’re all gonna become dirt for worms, if the worms live. But the worms won’t live, will they? They’ll fry up. I read that people eat fried worms in parts of Asia and Africa, or some other weird continent. I don’t judge them, though. I’m multicultural. I’d eat fried worms, given the chance.

            I didn’t know what to say to that. It didn’t really mean anything.

            I don’t think there’s a heaven, she said. I think there’s nothing. I think we become nothing. Nothing at all. We’re gone. Fizzled out.

            I watched her lipstick move and I listened to the generator. I could see the barista, smudged, in the window’s reflection. Hunched over. I felt immensely sorry for everyone here, but only for a moment. It was a superficial sadness. I thought of a distant God, unseeable and undetectable, unmoved by our latent terror.

            I told her I was leaving, tomorrow.

            She reminded me of the deer that used to live in our backyard, the way their bodies froze when they realized we were looking at them. No you’re not, she spluttered.

            I didn’t understand why she said it like that, but she did. I’m going to Vermont, I said. I’m going to my parents’ house.

            Parents are a social construct. The nuclear family is bullshit.

            Okay.

            Anyways, I thought you’d be with me.

            Oh.

            A strand of hair delicately hung over the bridge of her nose. I watched her tuck it back in line with her friend, though the reflection in the window. Her throat spasmed and it repulsed me, again. I realized that I was predictable. She hunched her shoulders, but she didn’t say anything. The generator squealed.

            I’m leaving tomorrow morning, I said.

            You can’t be serious.

            My sister called me.

            Maggie?

            Molly.

            Whatever. See? That’s how much you even talk about her. And you’re just, you know, just gonna drive all the way to fucking Vermont? Like that?

            Yeah, she asked me to.

            Daisy’s upper lip quivered. I waited for her to say something, to ask me to stay, but I knew she wouldn’t. The condensation off of my plastic coffee cup dripped onto the table, forming a wide moat. I glanced at the barista. He was staring absently at the generator. I stared at the generator, too. Daisy craned her neck, to join us.

            I blinked the sweat out of my eyes. I sensed Daisy’s arm creep across the table, toward my prone hand, and I discretely slid my fingers around the corner of the table, gripping it tightly. I clenched them, in time with the heaving of the generator, until the corner of the table dug into my palm and formed a deep groove, like a half-made stigmata. I heard her sigh, ragged and vicious. I didn’t say anything.

            “I mean. I know there was stress. But every family has that. We all got along, in the big picture,” Molly says, tucking her hair behind her ear.

            “Sure.”

            She sighs, flexing her fingers, digging them into her scalp absently. I turn my eyes toward the sink. I think about dumping the coffee down the drain. That’s a waste. Not that it matters. But it’s still a waste. I fit my fingers into the handle of the cat mug. I remember when Mom broke the mug, in the sink. She dropped it while she was doing dishes. Molly didn’t get into Dartmouth. God, what a mess than was. They were all screaming, like it was the end of the world.

            “I want to take a shower,” I say. I feel dirty. My gaze sags over the calendar. It’s still stuck on June 18th. It’s not June 18th. “Is there any running water?”

            “Yeah, I used it to make coffee.”

            Right.

            That makes sense. Right.

            I set the mug down on the counter and move past her. I slide past the room I shared with Tony. Molly’s closed door, the laundry room, our parent’s room.

            I stop, staring down the hall toward the bathroom, stuck to the floor.

            There’s a smell, underneath our parents’ door. I stand there, swaying. I look at Molly, at the kitchen counter. I shift my feet, an animalistic worry swarming in my gut, my skin tight and tense.

            It smells like piss and vomit, through the door. And shit.

            Reminds me of when I found Moxie under the water heater.

            “Molly?”

            She turns, looking at me with a blank face.

            I rest my hand on the doorknob.

            She doesn’t move. I don’t either.

            My wrist curls.

            The smell.

            I recoil, coughing. My eyes water, giving me blurred snapshots of bloated bodies on the gray bed.

            The door snaps shut.

            “I found them like that,” she whispers.

            I blink. Molly covers her face with her hands.

            “Molly.”                       

            She stuffs her fingers in her mouth and shrugs.

            “Molly,” I say, slowly.

            “You’re here now,” she says. “I’m sorry, I honestly didn’t know this would be how it turned out. They were like that when I got here. I really didn’t know.”

            I release my hand from the doorknob, fingers stiff like iron clasps.

            I look at her. She presses her hair to her lips. Her eyes are wide and wet. Brown. “Molly,” I say, again. She squeaks. I pinch the bridge of my nose. I count down, from five to one. “How long have you been here?”

            “About three days.”

            I groan, pressing my fingers into my face.

            “What!” she says. “Ugh, you’re always like this. Even right now.”

            “Drop it,” I say. I wave my hand at her.

            “You’re ridiculous.”

            “Molly. Drop it.”

            “I called you fourteen times before you picked up! _Fourteen times!_ Do you have any idea how I felt? And don’t tell me you were at work—Mom told me you got laid off, four weeks ago.”

            I rub my face. The smell is stuck in my nose. Awful. I think about our mother, in her bedroom, overgrown and sagging off the edge of the bed. Like an obese chrysalis. Gestating in a fetid pool of her and our father’s shared bacteria. I think of the blush on her face, in church, moving my arm to shake the priest’s hand. I think of the clench of her fists, after dinner as we scrubbed plates clean in the sink, the television squealing in the living room. I think of the back of her head, watching her from the back seat of the car, parked in front of the Dollar General, her knuckles white around the steering wheel. Whatever makes you happy, I can hear her say. We all love you, I can hear her say. You’re our son, I can hear her say as though she’s reading each word from the dictionary. I can smell her, softly, in the bedroom. I can smell her, cloying, on my scratched fingertips.

            Molly’s face rises, pale and bloated,  in my vision. Her lips are twisted. I scrunch my face and smooth it out. “Seriously, Molly, drop it.”

            Molly drops it. She sulks against the counter. My fingers skitter along my jaw. I breathe, furrowing my brow. That’s definitely the worst thing I’ve ever smelt in my life. I’m glad Tony didn’t come. If he were here right now, he wouldn’t be able to shut up. See, this is why I didn’t want to come, he would say. See, do you think Mom was praying, or Dad? I don’t think so, I think this whole family’s full of secret atheists. This is why I didn’t want to come up. My kids go to private school.

            I don’t actually know if he would have said that. His voice, crackling over the phone, crawls in my ears. You got it lucky near DC, he told me over the phone. All you got is homeless people. We got fucking Mexicans, that’s what we got. Resources are thing as it is. You think we got space? We don’t. I’m not made of money; all my savings went into reserving a spot in this fucking bunker. They probably just got in as ref-you-gees. It’s not fair.

            But at least I’ve got a shot. What about you? Not a good end for you, is it? Mom told me you broke up with your girlfriend. That sucks. Listen, you got to find a girl online or something. Those are the only kinds of girls that go for guys like you, the kinds of girls that date online. Not that it matters, now, I guess. Are you going to see Molly? Of course you are, because she asked you to. Shit, you think you won’t go if I ask you not to go? I’m not going to ask that. I won’t give you that out. That’s probably what you want. You never take any Goddamn responsibility. When you see Molly, tell her I think you’re both stupid. Stupid. Do you understand?

            Me? I didn’t say a Goddamn thing.

            “You’re ridiculous,” she starts again.

            _“Molly.”_

            She balls her fists and presses them against her forehead, baring her teeth at me. I stare at her, incredulous. I’m younger than Molly, but I’ve never felt like the baby of the family. “You didn’t think to move them outside?” I say.

            “Why don’t you do it, then?”

            I don’t move.

She flaps her hand at me, scrunching her face. “This is awful.”

            “Yes.”

            “You hear the weather report for the next week?”

            “No. I figured it doesn’t really matter, considering.”

            “Well, yeah, but still. Nothing below the one-tens. Can you believe that?”

            “I can believe that.”

            She sighs, her back sagging against the counter, slopping over the laminate. “Tony didn’t return my calls, either, you know.”

            “Okay.” I wipe my nose.

            “I hope he’s okay.”

            “Yeah.” I glance between the kitchen and the bedroom doors. There’s the crack up my old door, the bottom left. I think of the flickering light bulb in my old room, buzzing over my head like a nest of flies. I wish it would just fizzle out. I’m not tall enough to take the light bulb out. That was Tony’s job. He’s six inches taller than me. Might be five, now, who knows. I don’t, I haven’t seen Tony in at least two years.

            I wipe my face. My palm is wet and sticky. “Patty doesn’t really know what’s happening, does she? Why you’re here? About. You know, about Mom and Dad. And all that.”

            “She knows,” Molly says. She kicks her feet out, staring at her toes with an absent expression.

            “Did you tell her?”

            “She knows,” Molly says, again.

            I turn around, looking at the closed door. I wonder what Molly’s room smells like. I wonder if the mattress is still against the wall, opposite the window, covered in decades-old stuffed animals and folded blankets. My old bedroom is the exact same as it was, minus bed sheets. Same mattresses, same light bulb. No Tony, though. But it doesn’t matter, I think, because it all feels the same, regardless. Tony doesn’t even need to be there. Anger rises, thick like bile, in my throat. I didn’t need to come here. I could have stayed with Daisy. I could have been alone. I could have been in Baltimore, in my own room, in my own bed. I could have ended it all in Baltimore, in my sleep. No smells and no coffee, no stained laminate or meaningless conversation. I could have gone, silent, and simple, and shallow. Like I always wanted to.

            “Hey,” Molly says.

            “Hey.”

            “Are you—”

            “I’m fine,” I say. “Really.”

            “Are you still with Daisy McAllister?”

            “No, she broke up with me when I lost my job.”

            “Oh.” She settles against the counter.

            I scratch my neck. Feels raw and clammy. I can hear a faint buzzing, in the back of my skull. Flies. Locusts.

            “Patty’s birthday is in a month,” Molly says.

            “Okay.”

            “I bought her all of her birthday presents, last week. I spent everything except my gas money.”

            I run my fingers through my hair. My scalp is soaked. I wipe my hand on my pants. It leaves a dark stain. 

            “Do you think I’m a good mother?”

            I shrug. “I’m not a mother. What do I know about mothers?”

            Molly rolls her eyes.

            I’m shaking, I realize, staring at my wrist. I’m shaking. I smell like shit and I’m shaking. I clench my jaw, blinking out the window. The sun is so bright. It’s so hot.

            The light bulb needs to be changed in my old room, but that’s Tony’s job. I can see him reaching up. I can feel his fingers, reaching. Buzzing and squirming in his grip. I decide what I do with you, he says, do you understand. Yes, I understand, Tony. Do you _understand?_ Yes, I understand, Tony. Like a mantra, like the responsorial psalm in Mass. Yes, Tony. Yes, Tony. I _understand_.

            “Did you.” I wipe my nose. “You know, did you go, uh, inside. Their room.”

            Molly looks at me. “No,” she says.

            “You got here three days ago.”

            “Yup.”

            “And they were already, you know. Like that.”

            “Yes, God, I already told you.” She grinds her palm into her cheek. “Jesus, you’re still the same mess, aren’t you? Holy shit.”

            I examine her white face. The skin covering her jaw quivers. The cracked clock clucks at 10 o’clock. I don’t know why I came. Maybe because Molly told me to. God knows I do what people tell me to do.

            I rub my arm, skin sticking together. My palm makes a sucking sound. I can’t stop smelling them, in their room. “I guess I’m not taking a shower.”

            Molly laughs too loudly, her lips peeling back from her teeth. I stare at her. She stops laughing, looking back at me. Her fingers jitter nervously around her neckline.

            “I’m glad I could see you,” she says, “before everything is, you know. Over.”

            Over. Right.

            “No problem.”

            The sun winks, through the window. I shuffle to the counter, my breath aching. Molly settles a cold hand on my shoulder. Skeletal and fine. I shiver. She retracts it.

            “So it’s just us,” I say, feeling faint.

            “And Patty.”

            “And Patty.”

            I reach for the mug. I remember when Mom dropped it in the sink, splashing water all over the counter. I remember Molly crying, rubbing snot into the collar of her shirt and dabbing her eyes. I remember Tony grabbing Molly’s hand. I remember her smacking him. I remember Dad sitting in the living room, not saying anything, just listening to the wailing sports channel. I remember to the sink and fished the mug out of the water. Chipped, the white porcelain underneath rough to the touch, like a fresh war wound.

            Molly’s door creaks open.

            “Hi, Patty,” Molly says.

            “Hi, Mom.”

            “Your uncle’s here. He came in, last night.”

            I flex my fingers. She’s dressed in a sleep shirt and underwear. She has freckles. Messy hair. Her thin ankles shivering against the wood floor. “Hey, Patty.”

            “Hi.”

            I look down, a miasma of nervousness and shame unfurling in my ribcage. I think about Patty’s dad. I think about Tony’s kids. I don’t have kids. I don’t know what I would have done, if I had kids. If I had any morals, I would have bought a gun and shot them.

            “Do you want some breakfast?” Molly says. She keeps tucking the same strand of hair behind her ear.

            Patty stares at her.

            I pick up the cat mug and take a drink. Lukewarm.

            Molly sighs, loud and ragged.

            Patty doesn’t make a sound.

            I don’t say a Goddamn thing.

            Patty cranes her neck to look out the window, at the dead grass. At our two blue cars, front to bumper. Dusty and glittering, like sapphires. I rub the nape of my neck. My hand comes back, glistening with sweat.

            There’s a line of tension between the three of us, taut like fishing wire. Molly rubs her hands down her face, dragging her cheek meat past her lips. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.

            I can smell Mom on my fingers. They itch.

            Patty stands in the doorway, watching us. 

            The air is tight and coiled.

            Thick, like breathing in through a blanket.

            Molly drifts into her room, like a specter. Patty glances between us. Her eyes are curious, sliding over the contours of my face. I hold still, under inspection. But she doesn’t say anything.

            I set the mug down. The cat curls its lips at me. Shattered porcelain in the sink, my bloody knuckles floating in soapy water and Molly screaming. There’s a golf ball in my throat, when I look at it. I scrunch my brow. Slip my fingers out of the handle. The tail. I turn to see Patty still standing there, by the door. Her eyes are bright blue, like little rhinestones. She doesn’t look like Molly at all.

            Molly sits down on her old bed. She swings her legs up and curls them under her, lying down. I stand at the doorway, arms hanging by my sides. Patty’s damp breath curls against my bicep. I think of our parents, decomposing in their bedroom.

            I don’t feel bad for Molly.

            I sit down next to her, the mattress squealing. There’s nothing else in the room, just the bed and the window. One of them could have slept in Tony’s bed. I wouldn’t have minded. This room smells like mothballs, too. I see our parents, underneath the window frame. I blink. I know they’re not there, but they don’t go away.

            “Tony isn’t coming,” she croaks, eyes dry. Staring out the window.

            Her hand is dry and light, like papier-mâché. “No,” I say, turning it over and over in mine. “No, he’s not.”

            “You always were the better brother.”

            That doesn’t deserve a response. I can hardly hear Patty’s breath, to my left. It’s a shame, that she’s got to see her mother so broken up. Molly’s always been delicate, I think. Her skin feels like baby powder, soft and white, like fresh bread mold.

            “We all loved you,” Molly says. “Always.”

            “Right.” It doesn’t really matter. I think of her hands, pressing my wrist against the burning truck. Plunging my hands into the lukewarm water to pick up the pieces clogging the drain. Tony’s upturned lip in the darkness, the promise of his teeth. His tongue sliding over his canines, my pulse a staccato in my jugular. And the light bulb, over my face, dark and warm, swaying back and forth like a cat’s tail. Looking down on me like an eyeball.

            “When do we die?” Patty says.

            I look at her. “Not sure. Sometime today.”

            She sits back, satisfied. She nods to herself. I feel a displacement. Like I’m floating a half-inch out of my bones. Like my skin’s vibrating, millions of little fire ants humming.

            It’s so hot. My shirt is soaked through. Gross.

            Patty looks back at me, with gray eyes.

            I blink.

            The sun is so bright. Like a child peeking into the window of a dollhouse. A hysteria bubbles in the hollow of my throat, at the thought of God reaching through the door with fat, sticky fingers and snapping my neck.

            Patty looks at me with steady eyes. Patty is fourteen.

            “You’re going to die,” I say. “You know that, right.”

            “Yeah,” she says, frowning.

            She hasn’t even finished puberty. She hasn’t even driven a car or taken calculus or kissed someone or smoked a cigarette. 

            “I just don’t want it to hurt,” Molly heaves.

            “It won’t,” I say.

            “You don’t know that,” Patty says.

            I glance at her. She shrugs. I frown. She shrugs, again. I look at the curve of Molly’s bone, straining against the pale skin of her ankle. A blue vein races over it, like a tributary. The human body is ugly, I think. I feel dirty. I feel dirty in a way where I’ll never get clean. It doesn’t matter, I tell myself, but I don’t believe it.

            “You’re fourteen,” I say.

            “Almost fifteen.”

            I don’t say anything.

            I think of the calendar, by the sink, June 18th, by the mass-produced daisy field. My throat is tight, bubbling with unsayable things.

            I imagine God positioning my ugly, seated body in the pew. I imagine God directing my wobbling legs through traffic. God, pulling me back into the truck bed. God, breaking up with me at the bus stop. God, staring down at me in the darkness of our shared bedroom. God, the toddler with a bulbous yellow head, fumbling with our little doll limbs, snapping them off and sticking them in His mouth.

            Molly’s crying.

            The corpse smell is stuck in my nose. I wonder if Patty can smell it on me. I can smell it on me. On my fingertips. They reek. Mothballs. Tony’s teeth. The sun is so bright. The sun is so hot. Sweat beads my hairline. I discretely throw up in my mouth.

            “Why did you come?” Patty asks me.

            “Because I’m your mother’s brother,” I say.

            “So?”

            “It’s just something you’re supposed to do.”

            Patty’s eyes glitter in the light. Twin diamonds. Cat’s eyes. I freeze.

            A gaping silence opens in my chest. It grows, slurping down my insides.

            “You’re going to die, too,” Patty says.

            “Yes,” I say, blinking and sizzling.

            I can see my reflection in Patty’s eyes. I have a cowlick. I reach up to pat it down. Patty blinks, and I’m blind. I settle my hand on my thigh, knuckles red and loose.

            I could have ended it all in Baltimore, in my sleep. No judgment. Only the drip of the faucet. No eyes, no bodies, no mirrors. All my cowlicks in place, my face pressed into my unaware pillow. And when the sun rose, I could have kept my eyes closed and my lips sealed. My brain flat-lined with sleep, no thoughts at all. Radical acceptance. I could have finally become what I had always wanted to be. A more convenient sin.

            “You’re young,” I say.

            God’s great eye glares at us from the window. It squints, focusing on Molly’s snot-stained face. Pupil flicking from her to me. To Patty. Patty bares her throat, eyes wide.

            “I know,” she says.

            The room is so bright.

            I squint out the window. Between my eyelashes, the sun is small and flickering. I think of my old room. The light bulb needs to be changed. I can see Tony. Reaching. The swinging light bulb, hanging itself above our heads. Death throes. I garble up at it, because it is above me, a bright and hard light. Distant and unmoved. Like Tony’s face, distant and unmoved. Tony has blue eyes—bright blue, husky dog blue—that glow in the darkness, hanging over his mouth like twin stars orbiting a black hole.

            I understand.

            There are certain things no one here wants to know.

            The color drains from the floor and then the ceiling. Patty is yellow and effervescent, bubbling out of her sloshing skin, like champagne. I watch her float out of her bones, grinning her empty mouth at me, dimples flashing. Molly weeps, loud and echoing around the chasm of my skull. I fumble for grab her ankle, but it slithers out of my grip. Slipping through my fingers like melted butter. God narrows His eye at me, pupil dilating.

            I close my eyes, and the darkness swallows me.  


End file.
